Augustine (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 451 Christopher Kirwan. Augustine. The Arguments of the Philosophers Series. New York: Routledge, 1989. Pp. viii + 247. Cloth, $75.00. Here is an unusually thought-provoking book about Augustine, perhaps the first to concentrate largely on the quality of his arguments rather than the details of his variegated life and the uplift (or the reverse) which we are supposed to derive from his writings. As he says himself, Kirwan has written an unfinished book. He has concentrated primarily on a cluster of topics: free will, time, creation, the origin and nature of evil. There is also discussion of Augustine's arguments against scepticism (though surprisingly little on his "anticipation" of the Cartesian cogito:faUor, ergosum), and of his treatment of linguistic signs. The final chapters CA Priestly Life," "Christian Society ") move more broadly into a number of moral and political areas: lying, sexual morality, suicide, the nature of politics itself. These chapters are often more ordinary. There is nothing on Augustine's philosophy of mind, an omission which Kirwan himself characterizes as "somewhat perverse" (vii); one more chapter would not have made the book too long. The strength of Kirwan's work is that it treats of arguments, as the series prescribes ; its weakness is that the arguments, despite some attempt to the contrary effect, are often treated out of context. Indeed, when Kirwan diverges on to the historical background of Augustine's positions, he is often rather out of date, or unaware of scholarly writing: as on chronology (7-8), theological reasons for the importance of original sin, the career of Mani (6o), and the origins of the idea of Two Cities (220-2 l). This is not the core of the book, but the core itself is sometimes affected by such unhistorical presentation, and this shows up, oddly enough, in the order in which the philosophical material is presented. The result is that it is harder than it need be to see why Augustine wants to claim what he claims. The most striking example is that Kirwan gives us a good part of three chapters on free will (78-1 ~8) before getting round to the question of original sin and the fall of man. The effect is to leave us with the (correct) feeling that in the discussion of free will itself some vital part of Augusfine 's position has been left out. That shows itself in Kirwan's account (8~-88) of three possible "degrees" of freedom--he claims that Augustine "needs" a l/bertas ad utrumqne, or what Hume called a liberty--with scarcely a hint (let alone an understanding) of Augustine's distinction between liberum arbitrium and l/bertas (the freedom of God and the saints in heaven only to do good). That in turn enables him to neglect the distinction between types of "power" (though he does say something about power to act, 8586 ). For though Augustine's God cou/d (i.e., has the strength to) spread cholera deliberately , there is no doubt that he "could not bring himself" to do so. And if that topic had come up, Kirwan would have had to say more about our unity in Adam, and how we are Adam (l 3o-3a). A similar, though ideologically explicable effect of Kirwan's neglect of the fall, is his insistence that "Augustine thinks that sexual activity, in itself, is wrong..." (19z, 196)--which is false. Augustine thought that there is something radically wrong with "fallen" sex. Nevertheless, although his account of sex in marriage is, to my mind, seriously defective, there is nothing wrong with his belief that fallen sex, as distinct 452 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 3o:3 JULY X992 from sex, often reduces to little more than one person exploiting someone else, or someone else's body. More attention in the last chapter to Augustine's powerful treatment of lust for domination--perhaps it is more or less omitted because of the limitations of the series, but Kirwan does talk about politics--would have been helpful. Kirwan's treatment of Augustine's arguments in themselves, however, is usually rewarding and deserves careful attention, though he sometimes draws later figures-Luther , Calvin...